Data: Racial profiling down

But minority traffic stops in New Haven still top proportion of population

The Bridgeport Police Department is the only municipal department in the state to have above average racial disparities in traffic stops and violations in 2018, preliminary findings of a statewide racial profiling analysis show.

The findings are part of the fifth annual report by the Racial Profiling Prohibition Project, created in 2013 as part of the state’s antiracial profiling law, which shows the state as a whole has reduced the number of minority traffic stops.

The full report is due out in

February and will include data analysis for all 107 police departments in the state, including more detailed analysis of the Bridgeport Police Department and Troop K of the State Police, which was also identified for statistically significant racial disparities in its traffic stop data. The analysis has multiple criteria, including comparing the percentage of blacks and Hispanic drivers who are stopped with the percentage of blacks and Hispanics in the community.

Hearst Connecticut Media acquired the preliminary data soon after the issue of racial profiling was raised by a state lawmaker stopped in Bridgeport after his license plate was run and his car was incorrectly identified as being stolen. Bridgeport police deny the legislator, state Rep. Christopher Rosario, was racially profiled.

Across Connecticut’s municipal departments and State Police troops, a total of 15.5 percent of motorists stopped during the analysis period were observed to be Black while 13.3 percent of stops were Hispanic motorists, according to the preliminary data presented by Barone. Connecticut’s population is 12 percent black and 16 percent Hispanic or Latino, according to 2018 census estimates.

In 2017, Stamford police pulled

over minorities in 44 percent of traffic stops, which is proportional to the city’s 43 percent minority population. Similarly, Danbury police stopped minority drivers 37 percent of the time, which is proportional to the city’s 39 percent minority population.

New Haven police pulled over black or Hispanic drivers in 69 percent of stops in 2017, slightly more than the city’s minority population, which is 62 percent of the city. Norwalk police stopped minority motorists in 45 percent of stops in the city in 2017, which is 41 percent Black or Hispanic. Greenwich, which has a large commuter population but is just 18 percent black or Hispanic, stopped minority drivers in 35 percent of stops, according to the 2017 data.

It is expected that much

of this data will be consistent in the 2018 report.

Though Bridgeport had not been identified as being above average by previous reports, Ken Barone, project manager with the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy at Central Connecticut State, which oversees the racial profiling analysis, said incomplete data sets from the department could have affected previous outcomes. Bridgeport did not digitize it’s record keeping until 2018, which created gaps in the data from previous years.

So, this is the first year that Bridgeport has been identified in the profiling report, but it is also the first year the state has a complete data set for the department.

“It’s not that Bridgeport hadn’t been identified in the past, but in years past, they lacked at collecting data so we never had a good data set for the de